How - Dov Seidman [60]
Humans have good and bad days, distractions at work and distractions at home. Wardrobe malfunctions happen. Recognizing this and learning to reduce the distractions that take your mind out of the game can make you a step quicker than your competitor, make you more focused, and help you to use your energies more productively. Keeping your mind in the game—learning to recognize and tame both the voices in your head and the HOWs that affect others—is a constant challenge, but more important than ever in a time when small lapses can mean large costs.
DISSONANCE
You walk into a bakery to buy a roll. Behind the counter in plain view is a sandwich preparation area, and on it sits a large bread knife. You order your roll, and when the counterperson hands it to you in a bag, you ask her if she will cut it in half and butter it for you. She looks at you sweetly and tells you, “I’m sorry, but we don’t cut.” You look again and, just as sweetly, point out that there is a bread knife sitting in plain view obviously used for cutting bread. She again refuses, telling you it is against bakery policy to cut rolls. Then she hands you a plastic fork and some butter. How do you feel?
A bakery with a bread knife that sells sandwiches should have no reason not to cut a roll for a customer. They represent one value—bread service—and yet enforce a policy that blatantly contradicts it. Perhaps the store manager believed there was a good reason for this seemingly inane rule—an employee once injured herself cutting that type of roll, a customer with a plastic knife might take someone hostage and rob the store, or the manager, a bread connoisseur, believes rolls should only be torn by hand and never touched by a knife—but no rationale will ever resolve the basic incongruity of the situation. So you react. Maybe you get angry, feel put upon, or feel disrespected. You might yell at the counterperson and make a scene. Or maybe you just grumble about it while you sit and have your roll and tea. This emotional response is called dissonance or, more precisely, cognitive dissonance.9 It results when the mind is asked to accommodate new ideas that conflict with already held beliefs.
As silly as the bakery story might sound, it actually happened to a colleague of mine, and it illustrates well the effects of dissonance on how you think. Despite our best intentions, we are sometimes confronted with messages we can’t avoid whose contradiction creates tensions that activate an emotional response. The voices in our heads go wild. This is not just a psychological effect; it’s a change in how our synapses fire. Studies have shown that when confronted with situations like these the reasoning parts of your brain—normally employed for effective decision making and sound judgment—actually turn off, and the emotional parts of your brain turn on. Dissonance physically impedes your ability to think clearly, act with reason, and make good decisions.10
Businesses send conflicting messages all the time, unaware that the dissonance they cause brings negative results. How many managers say they encourage the input of their subordinates but interrupt them by taking three phone calls, including one from a golfing buddy, while meeting with them? How does it feel to sit in that office, seemingly secure in the belief that your well-considered suggestions are desired, and receive undermining signals to the contrary? Do you lose your train of thought, start stumbling over your words, or bail out in the middle of your proposition, no matter how important it seemed when you entered the office? The next time you have an idea, do you just keep it to yourself? How many companies talk about trust and individual empowerment, and yet